The Edge in Black Friday

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"Fame, Fortune & Frank Sinatra"
"Propaganda", 1987





"Six months into the Joshua Tree Tour, The Edge has breakfast ina a hotel room in Munich and reflects on the tour so far. The highpoints, the higher points, and what to do next...


PROPAGANDA: So tell me about seeing Frank Sinatra first of all...

EDGE: Ah, Frank Sinatra that was fantastic... what a vibe! Can you imagine coming into Las Vegas, 'Never Never Land', and actually going to a Frank Sinatra show? I mean the setting was perfect, probably if we'd seen him in McGonagles in Dublin it wouldn't have been quite so magic
but in the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas at one in the morning after the Hagler/Leonard fight, it was amazing. His voice was in great shape. He seemed also to be giving us a rough autobiography in the songs giving you a glimpse of what he was about as a person. Each song showing a different side of him - and he is incredibly chauvinistic and incredibly old fashioned in that sense, but at the same time it was honest. Before Frank went on, they introduced us (U2) to the audience, which was a real buzz - got us to stand up and said who we were and they applauded us. It was hysterical, I mean Gregory Peck was there, and all manner of folks, and they made a real song and dance about it. That was funny. After Sinatra's set we went back and had a few words with him. He was great - it's hard to make an assessment of somebody in five minutes, but he was talking music which was good. Y'know after all these years he was talking about the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and working with Buddy Rich and we were talking about his band and how good we thought they were. Frank's obviously been very influenced by the Blue Nile, but you can forgive him that!

PROPAGANDA: What did you make of Las Vegas as a whole?

EDGE: One got the feeling that the whole of Las Vegas was desperately wanting to be taken seriously, as a proper city and a proper place to live and bring up your kids, and all that stuff, as opposed to its image which is kind of giant Butlins. They were just delighted that a band of U2's credibility would go and play there. Though actually we were there precisely for the reason that they were pretending didn't exist. To see all the gambling, to see all the strangeness of the American people coming with their savings for the year to Las Vegas generally to lose it all. We found that fascinating and that's why we went there. The 'Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' video was perfect in that location. It was a real laugh doing that. There was a lot of people around and we got followed around by this huge gang of people. It wasn't a problem though, because movies mean so much in America that people will do anything if there's a film crew around. You can get a permit to shoot almost anywhere.

PROPAGANDA: Like an L.A. rooftop, for instance!

EDGE: We did get a permit to shoot on the rooftop in L.A. for the 'Streets' video. The trouble was when the radio stations started announcing it was a free concert the Chief of Police got a bit freaked, especially as he heard the announcements in his car on the way to work. The Beatles comparison wasn't really intentional. We wanted to do something in a side of Los Angeles that no-one ever really sees, which is the downtown area. Everyone always sees Sunset Strip, and the film side and all that, but downtown L.A. is a fascinating place although very dangerous and very tough. We felt that that song for us has that feeling of escape from an urban situation. The rooftop in downtown L.A. was certainly very colourful, and we felt it was a good place to do the shoot, and set up the song well. There's a certain equality there, it's a funny thing, you get to the bottom and you find whites, blacks, Hispanics, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, everyone's on a level, no-one's any better off than anyone else and you get a suspension of the racial tensions. We spend quite a bit of time in this area of L.A. and we did some photographs on the roof of a building called the Million Dollar Hotel. It was originally an incredibly expensive hotel when downtown L.A. was an expensive and salubrious part of town, but now it's falling apart and is let out as really cheap accommodation. Apparently a lot of mental patients and people from state institutions, when they are released back into the big bad world are put into this hotel. But there's a real community feeling. We talked to a couple of guys in the lobby of this place, some white, some Chicano, and you sensed that they all knew they were in the same predicament which gave them a sense of community, which I found heartening that people in that position stuck together.

PROPAGANDA: So, how did you find playing in Europe after America?

EDGE: Well, America was such fun that I felt Europe might be an anticlimax, but it wasn't. You really never know what to expect in Europe, which is good from our point of view. In America pretty much wherever you are your audiences tend to be similar. The things that they like, the jokes that they get, favorite songs, and so on, there's not much variation. For instance the language barrier means that in some countries audiences seem to understand almost everything - lyrics, Bono's comments from stage, whatever. In a lot of other countries they understand little of that, which generally means throwing a lot of emphasis back on to the music. That's challenging and keeps you on your toes. Playing outdoors was a huge worry, because I've never seen an outdoor show
that I really thought was great. Once we got started though we were fine, in fact we're so pleased with the way the outdoor shows went that we decided to add more outdoor shows to the American tour. Now, I don't know whether we're being fooled, because there is an argument that the first fifty rows are going to think it's great, but beyond that you have your problem. But my impression has been that, out of the good outdoor shows, which has been a high percentage, that the atmosphere stretches well beyond those first fifty rows. Whether it gets to the very back I don't know, but I think it gets close to containing the whole audience. The one thing that seems to affect it is whether we have darkness or not. If you have darkness the atmosphere is much more intense than if you're dealing with daylight. This business of video screens is interesting. A lot of the outdoor shows
I've seen recently have had video screens, and I think that although they can be good for the people at the very, very back, I think it's a real distraction. Great sound is important. Just to have four guys on stage I think is important. It's not like an enormous array of musicians, there's only four of us, you hear the sound, and it's very straightforward, it's very simple. When you get into screens and extra musicians and backing tapes it becomes a more complex thing. A U2 show is very easy to relate to, because there's nothing to it. That guy sings into that mike, it comes out there and that's it.

PROPAGANDA: Bono's really loosened up this time round, but you seem to be even more
intense - you've even trashed a couple of guitars.

EDGE: Bono can be relaxed now, but I don't think I should be. If I got relaxed on stage the whole thing would probably fall apart! There's so much stuff that has to be dealt with on my part, that I really do have to be aggressive, or it would really not happen. I mean, U2 is about the contrasts within the group within the music, about the contradiction. Bono can be very relaxed, I can be very uptight and aggressive, but the reverse is true. Bono can get really freaked out, so the
rest of us rally round, and get it together. Both sorts of shows are very different, but work out in their own ways. Like Bono climbing onto the roof of the stage in Madrid! That was a bit of nostalgia. It was very funny - though I don't know if Bono realized how high it was.

PROPAGANDA: With the Joshua Tree, U2 has suddenly become a media event - are you happy
with the way you are perceived in the press?

EDGE: You kind of have to take your hands off that and say, well, what the press do is what they want to do. You could lose a lot of sleep over what Time magazine were writing about you, or whatever, but at some point you have to say well, whatever they're going to do, they're going to do, so let them. Early on if we were misquoted, or if someone made some thing up about us we'd get very pissed off but now you just accept that that's what newspapers and journalists are about.
Newspapers aren't about telling people what's actually going on, they're about selling papers. They're not a service industry, they're as commercially minded as any other. They have to be, and sometimes you're the victim of that. They make up stories, embroider stories, misquote you. It was quite funny the tour bus story, by the time the press finished with it it sounded like U2 were having a pitch battle with the Belgian mafia!

PROPAGANDA: Are you beginning to get America out of your system?

EDGE: Ah, we're only just scratching the surface. We're still very interested in
America, but for the next record I'd like to produce a rock and roll record.
A no bullshit record, with guitar, bass and drums and good songs.

PROPAGANDA: Do you think you're capable of that! This was supposed to be a rock and roll
record to some extent, but you ended up with a much bigger production.

EDGE: Well, there's rock and roll, and rock and roll. I think the spirit of rock and roll is what I'm talking about. The modern state of rock and roll is pathetic. It's just the pits. What I'm talking about is like what rock and roll meant when it first happened. A feeling of 'what the hell is going on?'

PROPAGANDA: A bit like punk was...?

EDGE: I think that punk was born out of disillusionment, but with rock and roll people had never thought they could feel like this before. It suddenly took everybody aback, and it was new. To get that now is kind of hard, but that's what we'd aim for.

PROPAGANDA: U2 used to be "The biggest cult band in the world" - Bono said U2 were
"always on the way but never arriving." Clearly you have arrived now - does it worry you that this might be your peak?

EDGE: It has occurred to me but it doesn't really bother me. One thing that did occur to me the other day was that this is a peak of one kind, in that it's the first tour that we've done on this level, and I don't think we can ever experience again what we're experiencing now. So in one sense this is it, as far as touring goes, as far as being in a band goes, the whole buzz of it. I'm in it right now, and next time it won't mean the same at all. It's kind of interesting to think that this is as good as it gets. I'm not really worried about it, it's just an observation. You see success on this level has never been the main motivation for this group - we've never had any qualms about going after it, we almost assumed it - but the things that we're really fighting for are musical things.

PROPAGANDA: Things are very different now to how they were on previous tours - how have
you had to adapt personally?

EDGE: Well, to be honest I don't really find it different. I find it a bit more exhilarating, being out in front of 70,000 as opposed to 7,000, it's a bit of a buzz. That's different, but as far as our day-to-day life and how we get on with each other goes, it's pretty much as it used to be. The internal thing is still very close. We let a lot of that stuff just wash over us without letting it affect us.

PROPAGANDA: What would you put that down to?

EDGE: Attitude really. I mean 'the big time'? this sounds funny but I suppose we always assumed it would happen. But what we're constantly fighting for is to produce the best music we can produce, the best lyrics, the best shows, and the actual achievement of the band doesn't affect that. It doesn't really surprise us or phase us that much. But we're still determined to do what we
can to ensure that in this position we do the best we can do."
 
:dance:

"Guitar.Com" - Interview with The Edge
June 27, 2001
By Jas Obrecht




"Close to the Edge: U2?s guiding light finds true creative spirit

Like Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and precious few others, the Edge changed our perception of rock guitar. His moment of transcendence came during the early to mid-'80s, when his band U2 became an international sensation via its powerful songs and extensive coverage
on a then-new medium called MTV. Such was the impact of "the Edge guitar sound" - an atmospheric amalgam of partial chords, harmonics, echo repeats, drones, slide, feedback, and other effects - that by mid-decade, music trade magazines in Great Britain and the U.S. were
flooded with classified ads for "Guitarist, U2 style," just as they had been with ads for Van Halen clones several years earlier.

While the Edge was not nearly as visionary, manually dexterous, or theoretically sophisticated as Berry, Hendrix, or Van Halen, he did share with them an essential musical trait - the imagination to turn his limitations into a unique sound and style. "What do I find most challenging?" he asked me during a 1985 interview. "Tearing up the rule book and saying, 'Okay, given that this is my instrument, what can I do with it that no one else has done before?'"

Of Welsh parentage, the Edge - born David Evans in 1961 - spent his youth in Dublin, Ireland. He studied piano and then acquired a guitar at 13, but didn't take the instruments seriously until he and three schoolmates - Bono Hewson, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr. - decided to form a garage band. "We were pretty disillusioned with a lot of the music that was coming out in the mid '70s," Edge said. "None of us had ever been in a band before. None of us even had equipment at that
stage, but we didn't think it mattered. It was then that I bought an electric guitar. Once we bought our own instruments, it was just a question of learning how to play them. Two of our main inspirations were the Patti Smith Group and Tom Verlaine with Television. Their music was so new and different, it made us excited and enthusiastic. As a would-be guitar player, I was struck by the fact that all these bands had a really well-defined sound that was like no one else's. So when we first
started putting material together, trying out a few chords and what have you, that was always in my mind: We have to find out what we have to offer, what we can do that's different. In developing our musical ability, we developed a sound."

U2's debut album, 1981's Boy, was, in Edge's words, "a total voyage of exploration. We had the time and, with [producer] Steve Lillywhite, the expertise to explore some of our more fantastic ideas. In a way, Steve translated what was there in essence live onto vinyl. In doing so, he developed and enhanced the qualities of the band that were already there."

The first U2 single to hit American airwaves, "I Will Follow," contained a classic example of the Edge's simple-but-dramatic rhythm/lead style, highlighted by his droning an open string against a pattern played on the adjacent string.

"From the beginning, our music was very trim," Edge explained. "The solos that I took were very short. And unlike what most guitar players were doing at that stage, they were quite melodic. I used to use a lot of harmonized strings, even in my solos, like droning, say, the E string against something I was doing on the B string. It had an interesting sound, 12-stringish sometimes. I didn't use a distorted sound; it was very clean. And our music really needed more than just one-string solos of the blues variety. That sort of thing didn't work, and it also didn't interest me very much, because it was being done so well by other people. At a very early stage of my playing, I just decided that for me that was totally irrelevant. It may have thrilled listeners, but as far as I was concerned, there was no need to repeat it. So instead, I put my energy into songwriting and approaching the instrument in a totally fresh way."

The band's follow-up, October, met with less enthusiastic reviews, but U2's third album, War, put them over the top. A rallying cry for political sanity in Ireland, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" swept the airwaves, followed by "New Year's Day," a song about political strife in Poland. On tour and record, the Edge cut a huge swath of sound, running his Gibson Explorer or Fender Stratocaster through a fragile old Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe echo (eventually replaced with a pair of Korg SDD-3000 digital echoes) into a Vox AC-30 and/or a Mesa Boogie amp. He also proved to be just as creative with a World War II-era Epiphone lap steel and a Washburn Festival amplified acoustic as he was with a solidbody electric.

The group's flag-waving and unforgettable June 5, 1983, concert at Colorado's Red Rocks was broadcast on MTV and released as Under a Blood Red Sky. By year's end, the Rolling Stone Critics Poll had named U2 the Band of the Year, and the Edge had reached his peak of influence.

Despite the accolades, the Edge remained modest about his accomplishments, attributing his success to "never really having had any guitar heroes. All of the guitarists that I've liked have been totally anti-hero stuff. I think of Neil Young - that guy gets so much feeling into his playing, but he's stumbling around a few notes. It means so much, but it's so simple and basic. Tom Verlaine was never an incredible virtuoso, yet he revolutionized guitar playing, as far as I was concerned."

The Edge's most effective means of songwriting and coming up with parts was emptying himself of what he already knew: "Whenever I start working on a song, I immediately try to forget everything, to empty my hands and head of anything that might be hanging over from another song or album.
I try to approach it like, 'This is the first time I've ever played a guitar. What am I going to do?' That's one way of getting through the conscious mind into the subconscious layer, where the true creative
spirit lies.

"Basically, I don't play proper guitar," he continued. "For a start, I avoid the major third like the plague. I like the ambiguity between the major and minor chords, so I tread a very fine line sometimes between the two. I tend to isolate chords down to two or three notes and then
octaves of the notes. Like for an E chord, I play just Bs and Es, including my big-E string. The critical thing is the echo. Because I very rarely rehearse, at first I am at odds with the guitar. It doesn't feel natural, but this means my mind is open to new ideas. I haven't formed ruts down the fingerboard by playing the same things. It's still very much unexplored territory. Maybe that's why I don't feel attached to my instruments. It's almost like I'm going to dominate them in some way. I don't feel like they're part of me; they stand between me and something new."

In search of the new, U2 radically changed direction for their next LP, 1985's The Unforgettable Fire, hiring producer Brian Eno and engineer Daniel Lanois to create a more abstract mix of synthesizers and orchestrations. "For me," Edge said, "Unforgettable Fire was an experiment in staying clear of the guitar for the most part. I did an awful lot more keyboards and general atmospheric work on the guitar rather than taking it to the forefront." In place of the bold, clean,
soaring sound that characterized his earlier work, the Edge experimented with using "zero sustain" by placing felt or gaffer's tape over the strings near the bridge and then playing with a bottleneck and/or echo, as heard in "Wire." He also created unusual tunings, such as the FADDGD heard along with an E-Bow on the title track, and bolstered "Pride (In the Name of Love)" with an echo sound from a digital delay. In our interview, Edge cited "Wire" and "Pride" as the strongest "Edge as Edge is" guitar tracks. "On the next album," Edge predicted, "I'll probably be doing something different."

That has been the Edge's - and U2's - tact ever since, as the band progressed from the anthemic The Joshua Tree and the American-roots-oriented Rattle & Hum in the late 1980s to the post-modern and decidedly European-sounding Achtung Baby in 1991, the dance-oriented Zooropa two years later, and 1997's Pop, where self-conscious arena rock meets techno. Throughout all the wealth, changes, and reinventions, U2 has remained firmly rooted where they
first began. "For us," the Edge says, "Ireland is like a shelter from the storm. It's a place to escape, a refuge. It's also one of the main reasons why the uniqueness of this group has never been compromised or diluted. Within a very short period of time, most of the groups that move to London or somewhere else start losing that individuality that sets them apart. The groups that succeed are the ones that stay where they are, where they've always been."
 
Okay, this whole Edge with eye patch mystery is really getting to me. I've gone to all the Web sites I can think of and nothing. I'm going to put it to the kids in EYKIW, maybe one of them knows.
 
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